In today’s Electrek Green Energy Brief (EGEB):
- Siemens boosts its US EV charger manufacturing with over 1 million more chargers in the next four years.
- The battle for most humongous offshore wind turbine gets a new competitor in China.
- UnderstandSolar is a free service that links you to top-rated solar installers in your region for personalized solar estimates. Tesla now offers price matching, so it’s important to shop for the best quotes. Click here to learn more and get your quotes. — *ad.
Siemens’ big EV charger push
Global tech giant Siemens is about to ramp up its existing EV infrastructure manufacturing output by producing over 1 million VersiCharge Level 2 AC commercial and residential EV chargers for the US market over the next four years.
The chargers will be made at a new US facility, which will be the company’s third US eMobility hub. Siemens will choose a location for the factory in 2021 and begin to manufacture the chargers in early 2022. It will create around 100 jobs across the site and regional supply chain.
A Siemens spokesperson said to Electrek that its manufacturing operation will have impact down the regional supply chain, as some of the parts needed for the Siemens chargers will be best provided by partners close to the manufacturing site itself.
The VersiCharge AC chargers can be used for both commercial/business use and home charging. Teslas can use Siemens chargers with an adapter.
The plant will serve as a counterpart to Siemens’ existing operations in Wendell, North Carolina, where it makes chargers for buses, trucks, and heavy-duty electric vehicles. In 2019, Siemens expanded the 272,000-square-foot Wendell facility to manufacture DC fleet EV chargers.
Giant offshore wind turbine in China
Electrek has written about GE’s mighty 814-feet (248-meter-tall) Haliade-X offshore turbine, which features a 14 MW, 13 MW, or 12 MW capacity, 722-feet (220-meter) rotor, a 351-feet (107-meter) blade, and digital capabilities. One rotation of its 220-meter rotor could power one household. One Haliade-X 14 MW turbine can generate up to 74 GWh of gross annual energy production.
Vestas has plans for a 15 MW turbine, while Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy is working on a 14 MW model that can be ramped up to 15 MW.
Now Chinese company MingYang Smart Energy has announced details of a wind turbine prototype that it plans to install in 2023. The MySE 16.0-242 will be 866 feet (264 meters) tall, have a rotor diameter of 794 feet (242 meters), and a blade length of 387 feet (118 meters).
MingYang says the massive 16 MW turbine will be able to produce 80,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually, enough to power over 20,000 households. Its swept area will be the equivalent of more than six soccer fields.
In a country that installed more than half the world’s offshore wind capacity in 2021 yet is still planning over 100 GW of new coal projects, MingYang points out:
One MySE 16.0-242 can eliminate more than 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 emissions over the course of its designed 25-year lifespan.
Read more: Vestas takes GE’s ‘world’s largest offshore wind turbine’ title
Photo: Siemens
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